Marilyn Monroe and David Attenborough were both born in 1926, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. If things had gone differently, we might be celebrating her 100th birthday this year as well as his. But “some candles were not made for lengthy flickering” and now, instead of a party, “we have a Marilyn blockbuster” at the National Portrait Gallery that is “packed to the rafters with her image”.
The show “goes down various alleys and has several twists. But it ends up coming to the simplest of conclusions: boy, did the camera love her.” It explores her photographic legacy in a clever way, grouping the “seemingly countless portraits” according to the photographers who took the pictures. It also insistently reminds us of Monroe’s own agency in creating her image: the exhibition casts her as a “self-made figure”. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, she grew up poor, with an unstable mother and an absent father, and was passed from foster home to orphanage. But even from the early days, she “knew how she wanted to be seen”.
“Marilyn was acting for the camera long before she ever appeared on screen,” said Laura Cumming in The Observer. The earliest picture here is essentially a teenage self-portrait, taken in a photo booth: she’s yet to adopt her “trademark blonde hair” but she already has the “joyously open smile” and perfect teeth of legend. Picture by picture, she develops the look for which we remember her – and “a star is born”.
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“You think you know her face, but each new image overturns the last.” She collaborates with each new photographer: “more intellectual with Eve Arnold, more intimate with Cecil Beaton, more seductive with Sam Shaw”. We variously see her “finger-to-temple over a book”; “tensely concentrated in a morning headstand”; “glacially glamorous in furs, or casually conversational in the back yard”.
Yet she is always herself in the photos – a quality the various paintings of her here fail to replicate. There are “tearful” pop-art homages by Peter Blake and Pauline Boty, and an “awful” portrait by Willem de Kooning that sees her as “a cock-eyed doll”. The “arc of this riveting show” is “perfectly conceived”, and as you reach the tragic finale, you cannot fail “to be intensely moved”.
It is moving, said Charlotte Jansen in The Guardian. But the exhibition also gets a bit “dull” at times. “Monroe’s cheeriness, the glut of gleeful smiles, becomes overkill” – and you long to see some “slips of the mask”. Still, it’s clear that she had “a special, unselfconscious command of the camera”. I wanted to “hate” this show – exhibitions of celebrity photography are seldom interesting – yet, whether as a “mousey-haired” teenager or as an “uncontainable, insanely glamorous film star”, Monroe herself radiates charm. She makes it worthwhile.
National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Until 6 September
